The Repudiated Immortals
by CaideSin
Summary: I like to sit and listen to the sound of the snowflakes landing on the trees. But I can't get used to feeling cold, I can't get used to what is happening to you and me. [roxas][au]
1. The Repudiated Immortals

He feels juvenile and he feels empty and his expression is like a slow moving freight train, an empty one, rolling back to station where it will probably be dismantled and never sent out again.

His heart, sequestered in his aching chest, is probably breaking, shattering in its bone-and-sinew cage as the sunlight seeps in across his face. Something not quite like tears is streaming down his cheeks.

He reaches trembling fingers, but there is nothing. Music rings inside his mind and he trembles everywhere.

He feels young and he feels empty, so very empty.

He wishes desperately to be cold, but he is not. He does not need the body heat that might have possibly been offered to him.

His heart, he thinks, has been broken for a good long while now.

He steps into the open air and does not weep for want of breath.

The gasp comes easily, and then he is—he is certain—dead.

**talkin' 'bout heart 'n... s-soul **

"Hello?"

_Hello, pretty. You are very pretty, do you know how pretty you are? Your ears and your eyelashes and your little toe. _

"Hello."

_Hello. Hello! Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring! _

Roxas. Some days he is Roxas and other days he is not. Right now he is Roxas, Roxas who is however old he is and is from wherever it is he is from.

_Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, static on the line! _

"Hello?"

_Oh, why Hello there!CrinklerattleshakeHow are you today? _

"Awful, I feel awful, awful, not empty, just awful," the throaty sounds of his voice are wistful and aching and awful.

_That's what happens when—When? When the earth explodes into tiny pieces and you are thrown across the galaxy to a strange new world where you can start your life all over again! When! When a train hits you and you're dead, dead-dead, dead deaddead Dead! _

"I…"

_Died. Gone to heaven, shot in the back, stabbed in the face, poisoned like a rat. You are a rat. _

"I died of a broken heart." Hands smooth his face, Roxas's face through the telephone.

_And the telephonic connection vibrates. Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring. _

"We are warm," the throaty voice of the warm hands is heated and sexual.

The laughter that crackles through the void of telephone wire is hysterical and beautiful, flying over his head in a myriad of obstructing colors and vehement parallels.

**¿am i happy or in misery? **

There are days and nights and lovers like this. When Roxas is dead and his eyes can't stand the darkness because it hurts. It hurts so badly that his retina bleed truth and laughter… He sees best in the dark when he's blind.

Roxas dies of broken hearts often and he has conversations on the telephone with the voice of those hands. They're white hands, soft hands, emptywarm hands that caress the line of his face where the telephone is cradled.

_"Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring,"_ they whisper like tepid gusts of knives and butterflies.

"Help me," Roxas tells them on some daynightlover when he's empty—empty and wakes up feeling poisoned and flayed.

The hands can't come to him, can't bypass the visual lines of voices on the wire, yhe hands can't _save him_ and all Roxas can do is wait until he feels cold again. Cold and alone and juvenile and empty all over again.

It's awful, he just simply feels _awful_. He does not wonder if this blind lying foal-cub will ever be allowed to grow up.

**is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?**

Roxas goes out for tea sometimes. He walks across the lanes of glass air and sometimes he tumbles off the stairway and forgets how to make himself fly.

That sounds _trite_, he tells himself.

He can't fly, none of them can, but they can walk wherever they need to go, even across the clear blue sky.

_Them_… he goes to have tea with _Them_ and they smile at him.

"Little brother."

He shivers. He loves them and they love him and they give him tea and console his unlucky heartbreaks.

"You were there again," one voiceface accuses softly, blue eyes a blue so pure that the blue is no longer blue and instead stretches beyond the aggravating boundaries of reality and into something far more serious and convoluted than imagination.

"I was there again," Roxas agrees and takes the jade-and-amber tea his only sister serves to him.

There is a coo and a hiss of very many birds and their dappled-gray picnic table stretches on into infinity. The founts burst forth all around them, shedding diamonds to the worlds far below.

One of his brothers sings for him in sadness and Roxas cannot smile.

"Sweet, sweet little brother," they all say for him and covet him and hurt him with the strength of their arms and he is defenseless and so sorry he cannot cry to make them happy.

They would be so happy if he would only ease the vice-thread spider webs strung around them all.

He cannot, but if he could… he is not sure he _could_.

His sister eyes him with her dark-woman's eyes. They're blue, blueb_lue_ blue blue, the blue of painted nails and powdered faces and curving sexuality and kris blades hidden in lacy garters.

Her nails stroke his arm and his flesh breaks out in hives beneath her touch, he squirms and scratches and the bees break free from his heart. The emptiness and the pain ebbs until he his newborn.

The birds sing savage songs, "_The phoenix is the only bird who does not descend_."

"Calf," one of his brothers laughs, his moonlight bliss oozing outward like a disease of shaking sickness.

Roxas does not begrudge him.

There is no rebirth for them, they are trapped in their bodies of steel and porcelain and bark and sea and sky and fire.

Brother Fire… his flames are wild, burning through the lacey doilies slowly. They are slowly coming to tell little brother the secrets of the universe.

_Don't tell, don't tell. Little brother is too young, too small, white, pure and untainted. Leave him to die again. _

**so far out my mind**

The stars bid goodbye to him and he is not Roxas today.

Today he is a Sora-something from that somewhere wet and wild; warmth.

The jealousy Roxas feels at this usurping is unbidden and endless.

It is wrong, _wrong_, Sora tells him in the voice of a child and a sun. A hollow sun, where the doves will not tread and the eagles will not soar. He is doomed to follow destiny's plans until the very, very, very end of time.

"It is a story of children," Sora cries. They are the tears Roxas never regains and when the brothers and the sister come, they are not happy and they are not amused and they call Roxas back with whips and chains and heady incenses, which smell like home and harbor and stable.

It is hard not to be Sora on the days he is not meant to be Roxas. It hurts him very much, like stabbing pains in his gut and a debilitating tension in his collarbone.

"The stars will still be gone when he returns," Sora says in that voice, the terrible voice that Roxas loves more deeply than all the heartbreaks he's suffered over time.

The birds sing, "_Time, time, time, see what's become of me_."

"We'll rebuild him then, we'll make him whole and new," one of the brothers says in a blue, _blue-blueblue_, blue voice, blue like the glint of an asp's eye and blue like the shudder of frightened trees and blue like the howl of a faraway planet.

Sora loves him too, Roxas knows, and Sora will break his heart too, Roxas knows.

He feels… empty and juvenile. Young, he feels young and helpless and ignorant. Empty, white and untainted.

**don't know if it's day or night **

The unicorns lower their horns to him and he pets their snouts and they cry little tears for him. Purple tears, purple like the sands of time and purple like the flow of memories and purple like the sound of suckling kittens.

The black beasts lick his face when he sits among them and the soft-yellow foals drop clovers into his lap.

He's been told four is the number of the dead and the lonesome magpie in the branches of the world trees agrees.

Sometimes, even, the unicorns will sing for him, if he is still not-weeping over the broken shards of his cracking heart. They sing like the wild and the world and the gliding of a parade of dandelion seeds.

Sometimes, his brothers will join him in the unicorn field. Well, the ones who can, at least. The one half-hidden by the shadows of his mind will come and hold him in his darkening arms and stare at him with his twilit eyes.

His sister never visits here, because she has not been pure for a very long time.

And the magpie hates him—the lone, solitary, magpie in the world trees.

"You break so easily," his brothers say to him. Sometimes, it is the one who is both and neither and everything and soft and smells of rotting flowers. It's a sweet, horrible smell, but the unicorns like it.

The lilac mares raise their noses to the wind to catch his brother's dying scent.

**I can't go on like this**

They cannot make him stronger, Roxas slides between their fingers, back to the arms of some cold-warmth face that will not treat him _right_. The minds of mortals are cruel when unfettered.

Some love him as Roxas and abandon him as Sora and others do everything in between, but none of them can stay. They hurtle over the edges of the falls and join the diamonds and rubies and emeralds and all manner of jewels.

They'll be made into precious jewelry no one will wear.

"I'm very lonely," Roxas tells a lion in his soft voice.

The lion walks away from him like lions always do and Roxas looks up as the giant cicada lands beside him.

"Your brothers and sister want you to come for tea," he chirrups in that buggy language Roxas has never quite gotten the hang of all the way.

"I've not yet been broken," Roxas protests, gazing off into a dull-winter-wake sun languishing on the very edges of the fading rocky horizon.

"Then do not come," the buggy-bug says with a shrug of wings and prickly little legs.

It disappears, leaving its skin behind.

**what ever it is, that girl put a spell on me **

Roxas awakes to the feeling of something warm and girlish in his arms and knows by the way she breaths she will not stay long.

Her eyes are green like poison and envy and betrayal and satisfaction. She is the same acid-love that always erodes Roxas's heart away.

"There is no one in this world to love me," he tells her.

And she leaves.

His siblings send the wolf pack to retrieve him, but he cannot go just yet. The telephone is ringing; he must reach with one hand and raise it…

_Empty, he is empty and he is young and his heart is probably breaking, shattering to crystalline blades within his chest and his organs swell and he chokes. It is so easy to die every time._

The operator on the telephone announces that he is dead. Time of death: eternity.

_Ring, ring, ring, ring… Hello. Telephone, Roxas, Roxas, say Hello. Your true love is on the telephone. Ring, ring, ring, ring._

Out there, somewhere, warm hands must be connected to a warm body.

_To love you the way you crave. Not the way your siblings hope you'll find. Don't… don't feel sad._

**something's happening, something's happening **

The tea tastes like frogs and the cakes his sister offers to him feel like a statue of some long lost god. Chewing on marble statuaries…

"We don't like _ah-whom_ you've been talking to," the one who likes to pretend he's father says.

The broken one giggles into his tea, it steams and bubbles wildly against his lips, and Oedipus glares across the long stretching table.

"That voice is not safe," the talking yapping-talker talks. His hair is black like storms and guillotine songs and spider children's shoes.

The one who is the opposite of Roxas reaches out and pets his hair with his lying-cheating hand and Roxas is not so terribly amused, but he leans in to the touch because one cannot deny their not-twin.

Sister crosses her legs beneath the table and the other brothers with the mind to do so drink their tea and nod and agree. The voice is not to be trusted.

Roxas considers them all and wonders what they know of trust.

"So broken," they tell him and the one who has been broken since birth laughs into his tea again.

"We'll fix you right up, you don't hear the voice when you're fixed."

Fix you.

"Ring, r_i_ng, ri_ng_, _ring, ring,_" the broken one murmurs as the bees break free from Roxas' crying mouth.

**(…) purple haze, no, it's **_painful_**, baby (…) **

The fires of destruction rule the Twisted Kingdoms of here and there and not really anywhere particular, but certainly here.

It is always that brokenhearted-day in the Twisted Kingdoms and _They_ break and build and break and build and Roxas knows he's not allowed here.

The days when he is not Roxas are when he could wander their depths, but Sora cares not for the Twisted Kingdoms and instead seeks to break the vows of Family and flee to the worlds beyond.

He never makes it. The starbright love-songs distract him _oh-so_ often until he's sitting quietly on the cold face of Pluto crying the alabaster tears that hurt Roxas to think about.

The hands haunt Roxas's artificial darkness when he is not himself and not-not himself. The hands dry his not-tears and smooth his hair beneath the white palms of their soothing hands. The hands hold the telephone to his ear and he hears the singing of blood-white mermaids.

They call to him and he answers, answers without being able to. His attempts not to choke fail in a special kind of misery and he is dead all over again. The sweet wind-chime sound of his breaking heart is strangely, _strangely_, absent.

He walks the paths to the Twisted Kingdoms and his sweet brother—the broken one who keeps devouring his own flesh in the fury of his own volatile-voracious-vicious passions—is there to greet him.

"I'll burn it all away, make you numb, make you whole, so very, very whole, so you can stop hurting every day."

Roxas touches his brother, strokes the flickering lines of his melting features.

"Will you miss me?"

"Terribly."

"Indeed."

Roxas kisses his cheek and seers his lips shut—_(familiesandsealsandritesandpassion)_—and then the flames rise red like the red of a panda's dreams and the red sound of a cricket's madness and the red of his brother's aching fury to consume.

_Ring. Ring, ring, ring, ring._

He is not Roxas.

He is young and empty. He feels like a freight train, going back to station to be filled up again and sent out. Again and again and again, returning empty, to be refilled and used.

_Ring, ring, ring, ring._

The hands are his own, Sora murmurs to himself tiredly.

Aged and tired, dying alone in the cold mountains of he doesn't know where.

Alone and empty, the Heartless ripping him to pieces, uninterested in his heart as it slows and stops beating after all this time.

Roxas is the quiet peace of new life.

* * *

**Standard Disclaimers. Lyrical breaks by Jimi Hendrix because the formatting on blows.**


	2. Amaranthine

He fell, even if it was unlikely that he was an angel. He honestly didn't think angels lived where he did—in the floating crystalline cities where no one knew how to fly and the rubies and sapphires and emeralds spilled from the cliffs, down to the multitudes of worlds below.

Roxas had never seen an angel. Still he thought he preferred the unicorns who lived in the celadon and honey fields, which would occasionally sprung up a few steps and hops to the south of his bedroom.

What was once his bedroom, he amended.

He no longer slept on the canopied feather bed. No longer slept with the old unicorns that had been driven out of the herd stationed as guard around him. Instead, he lay in the lowlands of his shattered purity, wherever that happened to be each night.

Sometimes it was a stranger's bed, and other times it was an alley.

**ﮚ**

When Roxas first fell to an earth, he knew the first rite was the loss of the virginity he had cradled for longer than existence.

Curious about the workings of this world and determined to make the proper sacrifice to free his siblings, he worked as a whore. Giving and taking, it was what had to be done. He fell quickly into their cheap patterns of destruction, and committed suicide within months.

His blood touched the soil, and the first gate was opened.

**ﮚ**

He awoke once more on a Wednesday morning. The comforting voice of the warm hands was not there to greet him, there was only a pigeon and a curious police officer.

"You all right there? You look like something died."

Roxas had never been well acquainted with humor; it wasn't his place in the circle. Sometimes, his brothers would try to tell him jokes, but Axel often wandered through his words without reaching a punch line and Xigbar liked to make complicated puns that Roxas rarely understood.

"I did," he answered earnestly.

The police officer gave him a strange look before edging away.

**ﮚ**

It went that way a time Roxas did not measure in any meaningful way other than the ritualistic spilling of seed, sacrifices of blood, and the sweet initiations of drugs. The exchange of lust for money had never meant much to his family, but now it served well to hold the gates at bay.

Roxas wondered—as he served and broke and died and was rebuilt and reborn and scarred in more ways than any could understand—if his sibling could accept what he had done. He doubted it, but to him… the freedom of his heartless family was paramount and he was its only protector now that he had deciphered the code.

**ﮚ**

It had been almost twilight, the sky had been amaranthine and the floating archipelago that was their home had been bathed in the same amethyst light. And beneath the crust of each island lay the flaming mirror-world of the Twisted Kingdoms, the sunset painted it a murky bastard heliotrope.

Axel writhed there, speaking in a repetitious redundancy none of them ever bothered to decipher. He spoke of the virgin amongst them, the eternal virgin whose inability to be gone from this place kept them all chained. Chained by his cycle of rebirth, brothers and sister alike, caught in his web endless chastity.

"Fall, fall, fall, fall, break shatter crack and crumble upon the rocks, the rocks of silver and gold, silver and gold, soft silver and sharp gold, eroded by wind and time, seconds to moments to minutes to memories, the ancient fingers caressing hardened edges…"

**ﮚ**

Some days were harder than others, the experience of true pain was fascinating and sometimes it went too far. He would lie foaming at the mouth, twitching, bleeding, bruised, broken, ripped.

The morning, like all mornings, brought him around again.

Life went that way for years, cycling through narcotics and cities (the change of temples was more important than perhaps even Roxas realized) and partners.

**ﮚ**

One night, in a city whose name he never learned, Roxas found himself propositioned by an immense man with a sharp nose and smooth head and skin that tasted like chocolate. He conversed like a criminal but wore a suit like a fed and he said, in his stormy voice, that he was in need of a companion.

Curious—_that curiosity might've gotten him killed if he'd lived a normal life_—Roxas went with him.

When they arrived at his uptown apartment, the man said his name was Rude and Roxas didn't believe him, but Rude fucked him hard and when he pleased. And as a trade-off, during the day Roxas was a housecat, left to destroy himself at his leisure. Whatever Rude's very secret job detailed, it gave Roxas access to a menagerie of pills and illegal paraphernalia.

There was one in particular, a little acrid pink pharmaceutical that sent him so high, he was almost certain he'd finally sacrificed himself enough. His hands groped upwards, felt the heavy, cold edges of the jeweled falls, and he cried out for one of brothers or his sister to haul him back over the edge. He heard Axel rambling in the backs of his eyes from his seat upon the throne of the Twisted Kingdoms. Axel's arms—_Roxas could feel it_—were bleeding where they were pierced by his seat of power carved from shards of glass.

Roxas awoke to Rude slapping his face, his dark strong features empty and his eyes hidden the way they always were behind his dark glasses. Roxas hadn't ever found himself wondering about their color until now.

Trembling, still doped horribly, he reached his fingers—very, very white against the backdrop of Rude—and pulled the tinted shades away.

Rude, towering laconic Rude, who probably had a real name hiding in the annals of history, along with the story behind his eyes. His eyes… only one was the dark brown Roxas expected, the other was a blue that almost rivaled his own.

"They're pretty," Roxas chirruped, sincerely.

Rude looked like he might hit him, but settled for snatching his sunglasses back.

"What are you doing on the floor?" he rumbled, grasping his housecat by the arm and jerking him roughly to his feet.

Roxas didn't smile; it wasn't his sort of expression most days. Instead, he moved on unsteady feet to the couch, Rude trailing after him with a noticeably less amount of steps.

**ﮚ**

Sometimes, Rude asked him about the 'medications', asked him why he took them, why he continued to take them, why he never seemed to die. But Rude had a bad habit of asking while they were fucking and Roxas never answered him at all.

It wasn't his nature to divulge secrets, that was Xaldin and sometimes Xemnas, but certainly not him. As the youngest of their clan, he'd needed lessons on this skill and Zexion had relished in instructing him in, what he called, the art. Truthfully, Axel'd had more to impart.

Axel'd had madness and deception and the flames and the destructive, consuming, power of the Twisted Kingdoms as his assistants. Roxas had no scars, for he did not change in that way. Even his lips—_which he had seared on his brother's cheek the day of his departure_—remained perfect. However, in his long-ago youth, he had blistered excruciatingly from the lessons brother Axel had to teach.

Rude—Rude, with his one auburn and one Prussian eye—would never understand. His calloused hands could trace Roxas' soft body for as long as they chose and the realization would never come.

But that was not the place of a mortal and it troubled Roxas very little.

"I come to you to make my broken heart beat." Roxas made the mistake of telling him, only once. The statement was not a fit of poetics; Roxas had no touch for that, as he did not have a touch for many things. To him, it was simply the truth. "Others have been in your position, and you can't have it forever," he amended as he realized that he had begun to share a secret that was not his alone to share.

Rude, to his credit, was discretionary.

**ﮚ**

Rude had a small partner who reminded Roxas far too much of his brother and whenever Reno would come—_flame haired and kindle-eyed_—to their apartment, Roxas found himself unable to stop watching him. Reno was more like a livewire and less like a crazed inferno—(_demented and bleeding ruler of the Twisted Kingdoms; warped reflection to the perfection of the crystalline islands where a clan of immortals and their tiny brother had lived in bondage since before time began_)—and this was a tiny comfort.

A very tiny comfort, as he eyes followed Reno's every move, holding even when the man would shoot a challenging or even flirting glance back at him return.

Rude, like brother Lexaeus, was surprisingly vigilant and intelligent behind his bulky façade. After only a few of these encounters, he drew Roxas to him when Reno had gone and asked about his interests in the loudmouthed readhead.

Roxas shuddered at his implication and said, "He looks like my brother."

To which Rude replied, "Sounds like farfetched genetics."

This made Roxas laugh for reasons that were far too complicated to properly explain, so he resigned for this, "Well, we're brothers, but we aren't. We're related, but not really."

Rude made a quiet comment about strange families, but it sounded half hearted and unconvinced, even to his own ears.

**ﮚ**

It was a wet Thursday and Rude sent his partner back to the apartment to pick up a fake ID that Roxas knew was hidden beneath the TV.

When Reno appeared at the door, Roxas's mouth made a strange smile because he was wound and sprung out of his mind; hurting from the rush of chemicals in just the way he needed to. He offered to make Reno tea and the redhead grinned at him in return, his florescent teeth as white as brother Axel's bones.

"What I could use is a fuck," Reno said to him. He swaggered in close and grasped Roxas by his slender hips. As he was spun around, Roxas tried to remember the days when the only part of him that mortals were allowed to touch was his heart, so that they could break it.

He did not ask Reno to fill him, Reno did that on his own, pushed the housecat down on Rude's kitchen table, took what he wanted and then left again, leaving Roxas slumped on the floor.

There was a magic in it. Defying his function, he told himself—_though he hardly needed the emotional comfort_. These acts of self-sacrilege would allow his beloved brothers and sister to be free. It was his new purpose; he would be the cause of their imprisonment no more.

If they could no longer remember how they had transgressed—for their confinement must have been a punishment—then it was time they were let loose.

As he sat on the cold tiles, foreign seed leaking from him, he wondered where his brothers and sister were. He wondered what kinds of beings they were touching, interacting with, wondered how they were living while he died again and again every day for them; how he shattered what made him, how he'd tread the Twisted Kingdoms and risked being as consumed as Axel _for them_. They had given him very little reason, outside of a fearful love, for this sacrifice.

They had hoped he would give them something one day, something that was not theirs to covet. Perhaps that was the true reason behind their endless mulct, but Roxas had no desire to contemplate such a thing.

When Rude returned and found him where Reno had left him, he hauled his pet to the bedroom and wondered, "Did he hurt you?"

Roxas shook his head. He almost felt as if he had enough opiates in him to keep him numb forever.

**ﮚ**

Reno came and went at his leisure from then on and, one day, Roxas heard Rude say in an incredulous voice, "I don't know what you and your brother do—" Which made Roxas nearly giggle, because it was true.

Things went as they were, Roxas drowning on his own vomit or his own blood, overdosing, under eating, dying during the day while patron and partner worked, keeping the gate open, trying to be certain, but never certain.

Not until the night he woke with a start, his skin feverish and his eyes darting through the shadows. Rude stirred beside him and looked through the gloom with his mismatched eyes.

"What?" he asked, his voice jagged with sleep.

Rude could not identify the unicorn-foal trilling sound Roxas made as he whispered, "One of my brothers is coming."

**ﮚ**

The first few weeks of search warranted him nothing in the way of his brother—(_and he was sure it was a brother. If it were Larxene or the in-between brother-sister, he would have smelt it, the musk of fertility. This, he asserted, was a brother_)—but he did come across some dirty heroin cut with rat poison that left him paralyzed in an alleyway for half a day.

He went back to Rude's apartment when he could, and the bald man took off his glasses for once and asked him, "How much longer you staying?"

There was something in his eyes that he wanted to Roxas to see, but all Roxas could say was, "Until it isn't enough anymore."

**ﮚ**

He found Axel on a cloudy Monday. It had not yet rained, but it was humid and the wet was coming and Axel was hunched over the fountain in the park, vomiting into it.

He looked up when Roxas approached and said, "You smell like bromeliads and smoke."

Once upon a time, his untouched scent had been of honey and clovers. Axel, as he would always smell, reeked of burning flesh with a temporary tinge of bile.

"Why did you come here?" Roxas wondered curiously, instead of letting Axel continue to think about the changes that had occurred in his littlest shatter-hearted brother. "Who sits on the glass throne while you're gone?"

Axel coughed and grinned, and after so long with only Reno's cheap imitation of his fanged smile, Roxas found himself startled by it.

"None of them are fit to sit on my throne, just as none of them were fit to sit on yours."

Roxas helped his older brother to his feet and after an awkward moment—a second of time frozen while they each considered the ramifications—they hugged.

Roxas buried his face into Axel's chest and did not weep, for it would never truly be his place to do so.

**ﮚ**

Roxas had many things to tell his brother.

He considered leaving Rude's nest immediately, taking to the streets, like before, and collecting enough money for a hotel room. That was all right for him, but he wanted Axel to have a soft place to sleep and a toilet to be ill in while it rained.

It rained for two days.

During that time, Roxas died once—(_burned from clutching Axel far too close_)—and Axel, great fire lord that he was, heaved over Rude's pristine white toilet every waking moment.

Rude was good enough to let them stay and was kind enough not to ask any questions.

Unfathomably, this gave Roxas great pride and when the rain had ceased he was thrilled to have the chance to introduce brother and patron. He was even more excited about letting Axel dominate Reno. In the way the original will always outshine a copy.

There were so many things to _tell_ his brother, so many new experiences he'd forced himself to have. All the ways he'd broken himself for their sake… When he heard all of this, Axel really only had one thing to say.

"They won't leave," he muttered, drinking coffee, because straight water hurt him terribly. "They want the thrones, they want to reshape everything, but it won't work."

Roxas thought on this for a time, thought on all the enthralling pain he'd finally been able to feel. How he had finally made himself something more than just the keening of his empty heart.

"Some of them must come, eventually?" he asked hopefully.

Axel smiled fondly at his naivety, and was still forced to concede. "Some of them, none of the eldest, certainly. Eventually, Marluxia will look for fertile grounds, but our brother-sister has always been able to leave."

**ﮚ**

Roxas took pleasure—_an emotion strange and unsought for in his haste_—in showing Axel the new world they had landed on, and could now wander together.

His brother was made uncomfortable by the pervasiveness of the sea, but he was coerced onto a Ferris wheel above its shining depths all the same.

"Isn't it beautiful?" Roxas questioned him, uncertain.

Axel thought about their home, where the unicorns ran like rainbows and the waters were made of gemstones. Where the ground was crystalline and the sky was no limit. Where even the mirror-world, his Twisted Kingdom, was perfect and ethereal in its way.

"Yes," he laughed and felt the mind-devouring power of his core force the action to become uncontrollable. His little brother hugged him as he laughed and he felt the flesh of Roxas's forearms begin to burn.

**ﮚ**

"Will you be all right?" Roxas asked him.

"No," Axel said without preamble and then looked up silently at the sky.

Roxas shifted on his feet before he offered, "You seem… better."

"What do you mean?"

"It's been a long time since you were… together, collected. I," Roxas began hesitantly, his eyes shimmered in a way that they never had before. "I think… leaving your throne was right."

Axel trembled. Roxas was right, it had been a very long time since he had felt something other than the painful consumption of the flames, _day in and day out_.

This place had changed them both.

"Roxas," he said, slowly. "I think… I will be all right, after all."

He watched a confused smile touch his little brother's perfect porcelain features.

Yes, this place had changed them both.

* * *

**Standard Disclaimers.**

* * *


	3. What We Are and What We Dream

The rain still makes him vomit and Roxas still dreams about Rude in the night, but not all things are meant to change.

Time is not something for forgotten immortals, but suffice it to say that Rude and his livewire Reno have been dead for a lifetime.

Axel has a propensity for eating tiny purple flowers. He balances their lotus blossom shapes on his serpent's tongue, staring cross-eyed until they burst into flames. He gobbles them down then.

"What does it taste like?" Roxas wonders, still unable to put the sound of coyness and teasing into his voice.

"Ash and water and petals," Axel sneers. "Why do _you_ still dream about Rude?"

Roxas draws his knees up on the window seat and supports his chin on them. The day outside is bright and breezy.

**ﮚ**

Roxas had gone back to visit him once, followed the scent of his skin to a new city Roxas did not know. He'd found Rude at work, in a boring stone building behind a desk in a glass cubicle.

In the artificial lighting, Rude seemed unchanged. This made Roxas smile and rap politely on the glass door. Rude unbent his massive form from behind the desk and then paused at the sight of him.

"You're back."

He removed his sunglasses and Roxas suddenly felt his age. The fact that Rude was here and not in the streets meant something very distinct.

"I'm back," Roxas agreed, coming closer. Rude's age did not frighten him. He should have expected it, he was not so terribly naïve anymore.

"You haven't changed," Rude expressed sadly. One of his great brown hands traced the lines of ivory. "You know, I've never dreamed about anybody, but I dreamed about you. You changed in my dreams, I don't know why."

Roxas held out empty hands, palms up, unsure of just what to say. "On… the inside. But I don't change, or die."

"What are you?" Rude put a hand on Roxas' shoulder and led him from the room, and then the building. Rude took him to a restaurant where he was served with awe-struck respect. Roxas observed this and smiled slowly, his chin balanced childishly on his hand.

Rude had returned his glasses and now waited for Roxas to answer his question, but Roxas was not ready to.

"Have you been here long?"

Rude's mouth curled and he refrained from asking Roxas what he considered to be long.

"No, a year or so. The company finally forced me into a desk job."

Roxas toyed with his silver-gold hair absentmindedly. "I never really knew what you did. It didn't… seem relevant, at the time."

"Part military, part cop, part spy, part terrorist, part thug, part mafia, part bodyguard. It's a complicated job description, you know." Rude took a deep drink of water, watching the blond out of the corner of his one blue eye. "You were… dead a lot of the time, not that I'd have talked about it anyway."

There was a strange expression on the boy's face and Rude balked, "Don't give me that look. I know how to check for a pulse and you were missing it more often than not. So… what are you?"

"Where's Reno?"

Rude slammed his fist on the table, but Roxas just stared at him with calm expectancy.

"As if he would himself get old." Rude gave in. "And fuck do I feel old… he's been dead about twenty goddamn years now. Took some bullets right in his fool face."

Roxas turned his eyes dreamily toward the ceiling, still fussing a lock of hair between two fingers. He hummed something softly in his throat, like a dirge.

He came back to reality at Rude's unexpected laugher. "I… forgot how strange you are. No, I didn't forget, but I'm remembering."

Roxas smiled fondly.

"You almost never smiled though," Rude mused, "and when you did it was like your face didn't really _work_ that way."

Their food arrived and Rude watched the boy eat with a subdued but noticeable relish.

"You've changed," Rude said.

Roxas took to twirling his noodles around his fork, brow furrowed and thoughtful.

"I've learned," he confessed. "From you, and this world and from my brother."

"Like you're an alien," Rude joked. "Where is Axel?"

"Mmm, somewhere," Roxas answered vaguely because he was not sure either. "And not quite an extraterrestrial."

"Then what?"

Roxas fell quiet again, he stabbed at his food a few times, opening and closing his mouth without finding the words.

"I stopped," he said at last. "I stopped dying because I didn't need to anymore and when I stopped I dreamt of you. You were good to me, in your way. I needed strength and violence then. I needed a safe place to die."

"_Fuck that_, Roxas," Rude growled. "What are you getting at?"

"Thank you."

Rude went very still and with a rolling anger rose from the table and dragged Roxas from the restaurant, he was still very strong for his age.

He took Roxas home to fuck.

**ﮚ**

"I'm a prince," Roxas murmured. It was part of a litany he had begun when Rude had lowered him onto the bed.

"I am a king, I am a son."

No one had ever replaced Roxas in Rude's life. No one was ever as strange or as perfect or as fragile as Roxas.

"I am a brother, I am the youngest."

Roxas had continued to die for a long time after he'd left with Axel. He had continued the sacrifice until one day Axel had told him it was enough.

"I am a child, I am a virgin."

Rude knew it to be true, for all the times he had taken Roxas, it had been the same chaste shatter for each.

"I am a boy, I am a secret keeper, I am a liar."

Roxas was very beautiful, Rude's own angel.

"I am immortal, I am a god, but I am a child and I am a son and brother, one of many."

Not an angel then, not a god nor a child, but both.

"I am the cold one, as mad as my brother who is consumed by the hungry flames. I am the abdicator. I am the sacrifice and the jailer."

Rude understood enough, in sense and in feeling. He didn't dare kiss Roxas and disrupt him.

"I am one of many, all of us forgotten; rejected. I am broken, I am incomplete. Perfect, as I should be."

Roxas took a deep breath, shifting, closing his eyes and moaning.

"I am not a man, nor a woman. I am not proud, I am not humble. I am neither kind nor cruel. I am not sane, I am not king, I am not father, just as I am not creator."

His breathing became more labored, his movements more erratic and with his words the picture became clearer to Rude. He could see the islands, floating in a vastness that may have been the sky. He saw the jeweled waters, he saw the strange creatures and the strange clan of immortal brothers and their sister. He saw the thrones, one constructed of glass and the other of its shards. Roxas was meant for one, Axel the either, yet neither of them were there to take their seat.

Rude shuddered. "I understand," he said.

Roxas' eyes opened then and he looked up at Rude with such an expression of relief and love in ice blue eyes.

**ﮚ**

Roxas had left in the morning without saying any further goodbyes. He'd rejoined Axel somewhere by the sea. His brother had become very ill without him.

"Because they are good dreams," Roxas finally replies. "I like to remember his touch, it was steady." He turns defiant blue eyes on his brother, daring him to mock.

Axel chuckles low in his throat. "Of course," he says gently. "Of course."

* * *

**Standard Disclaimers**


End file.
